Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to contribute to the debate on the Defence Legislation Amendment (Parliamentary Approval of Overseas Service) Bill 2014. I regret that I will not have the opportunity to speak for 20 minutes because, I know, people in the chamber want to bring the matter to a vote. Therefore I will confine my comments.

I regrettably oppose the bill. I do so for two reasons. The first one is the need to protect our military personnel working overseas. Not always are they in combat zones. If I look at some of the elements of this bill as it is proposed I remember that we do undertake activities outside Australia which are unlikely to lead to hostilities. If you look at the words in this bill you would see that it requires the parliament to be appraised of so much information that it would place at risk our people who are embedded in all sorts of theatres around the world—some of them publicly known, some of them not. They have families back here in Australia, whose addresses could be found. As a member of the Defence family, I would object very strongly to that.

I would say that there would not be a parliamentarian, if they reflected on that, who would not also be very concerned about the wellbeing of all of our forces overseas—whether they are in a military conflict role or not. Indeed, Australia is so well regarded for the quality of our Australian Defence Forces personnel that we need to reflect very carefully because, should this bill be passed, all sorts of information would be made available publicly because the bill requires us to debate these matters in the full parliament, which could place at risk our personnel overseas.

The second point I want to make is that there is a challenge to the current legal authority. For example, there is a question about the legal authority for the proposed deployment. There is the question of a report by the Defence minister about the 'legality, scope and anticipated duration'. Clause 61 makes it very clear that our Constitution gives executive power to the Governor-General, and ultimately to the executive.

I also want to point out, very briefly, that these decisions about deploying our troops or military personnel overseas are quite rightly made by Executive Council—with the cabinet giving the decisions full consideration--without the matters being fully debated.

Why should they not be debated? They should not be debated because of the element, often, in a military circumstance of the likelihood of success. If we are to flag to our potential enemies—our adversaries—exactly what we are doing, how long we are going to be in a theatre and when we are going to exit that theatre, all it will do is to give those opposed to us every chance in the world.

This is not just the case in the current circumstance. You can go way back to Sun Tzu in the Art of War. He said:

All warfare is based on deception.

He also said, very tellingly, way back when he wrote the Art of War:

Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.

The great German general, Von Clausewitz, said, about surprising the enemy:

It lies more or less at the foundation of all undertakings, for without it the preponderance at the decisive point is not properly conceivable.

He said that in the 1830s, and if this bill passed we would only be talking about the preponderance of decision-making through the full parliamentary process—passing both houses of parliament. We know that surprise lies at the foundation of all undertakings without exception, only in very different degrees according to the nature of the undertaking and other circumstances.

I regret that I do not have the opportunity to expand on these thoughts. I am very strongly of the view that there should be no circumstance in which the parliament of Australia ever placed our troops at risk as a result of the flagging of our intentions militarily. These decisions, quite rightly, should be made by Executive Council, the cabinet and the Prime Minister of the nation, elected for that purpose.